One day in 1953 when I was 12 years old the Leuchars Patch was shaken by the dull thump we knew only too well. My mother and I saw a vast pillar of black smoke and flame rising from the railway station about 400 yds away, in those days the Patch was only half its present size and we lived on the corner.
We ran down to the crash site to find two of my friends in hysterics, they had been trainspotting beside the up line when a Meteor crashed vertically across the road from them and no more than 60ft away. The lunchtime train to St. Andrews was at the station platform, loaded for departure. My friend Alan was blackened by soot from the burning aircraft. Another friend who had been walking to join the spotters said he had seen the Meteor pilot waving and had waved back as the aircraft turned steeply and dived into the ground.
The pilot, Group Captain Norman Bray, DFC, had just been checked out on the T7 and was on finals when the hood opened, upsetting the airflow around the tail and contributing to the Meteor spinning in. His 'wave' to my friend was probably an attempt to close the hood although it could have been jettisoned via a lever in the cockpit. Gp Capt Bray is buried in Leuchars cemetery. Two other Leuchars Meteors were lost that year but, as has been said, nobody seemed too worried about it.